No Magic Formula

The UK now has an Internet censorship system that is used to address various unlawful use of the Internet, but it was initially restricted to blocking images of child sexual abuse. The system is easy to bypass, but it was hoped to reduce the likelihood of people accidentally accessing such images. At any one time there were only a few hundred web addresses blocked, and all entries were manually checked, so it was rare for material to be incorrectly categorised. However, once the blocking system was in place, there was pressure for its remit to be extended. First, the movie and music industries successfully obtained court orders to add entire websites which facilitated access to copyright infringing material. Now the UK government are proposing censoring legal adult websites too (unless the person who pays for the Internet connection requests an opt-out from the blocking system, and proves their identity and age). The system to block adult material is already in place for customers of mobile Internet connections, but due to the huge number of websites now being blocked, the quality of checking of what belongs on the list has gone down. Websites being incorrectly blocked include political parties, news sites, and sexual education information. Measures that started off as blocking of a small number of carefully selected web addresses containing illegal material universally regarded as abhorrent have morphed into the mass censorship of legal material with little or no human intervention. In the US, Internet users can even be disconnected entirely from the Internet if anyone from their household is too frequently accused of infringing copyright; the UK government is one of several others discussing similar measures. Blocking child sexual abuse images does not stop the crime, and for the vast majority of other crimes involving the Internet there are no technical measures which can prevent the crime occurring. Therefore the emphasis in legislation has been on detecting and punishing perpetrators in the hope that it will deter others. One area of rapid growth in this field has been Internet surveillance, with the draft Communications Data Bill being the UK government's latest and most privacy-intrusive proposal yet. This law, if enacted, would allow public bodies to order ISPs to record their customers' activities, even when the customer is not suspected of having committed a crime and where there has been no judicial oversight of the order. The costs of implementing …